Red Deer has designed Grá, an artisan sourdough pizza and natural wine restaurant in Los Angeles.
Collaborating closely on the design with founder Michael McSharry, Grá (the Irish word for love) echoes the passions of both McSharry and Red Deer; McSharry’s being sourdough and Red Deer’s being materials and mood.
Set on Pizarro Street near the lake in LA’s Echo Park, Grá found its home in a disused old barn complete with original trusses, a concrete core and marks from previous generations. The 3500 sq ft space is divided up broadly into a bar, a main dining area with communal tables adjacent to an open-plan kitchen, an off-street patio dining area and a recessed internal courtyard.
The open-plan kitchen and back of the house centres around a domed Italian wood-burning oven, the heart of Grá. Red Deer’s approach for the interior concept of Grá was simple and a practiced routine in commercial design in their home setting of London; but an exciting new journey in the LA landscape.
With a view to reusing and repurposing materials for both aesthetic value and environmental impact, Red Deer looked closely in local Los Angeles builder’s merchants and reclaimed yards and catalogued a new inventory of materials from which to curate the space. Disused marble shards formed the skeleton of Grá’s bar top with planter edgings becoming a beautiful bar front.
The floor was an exercise in love itself – lead architect Ciarán O’Brien dreamt of a tapestry of 40,000 individually laid granite setts establishing Red Deer and the concept at large. Red Deer and McSharry collaged moods in endless discussions about feeling and simplification to create a restaurant space that felt effortless. The integration of music was key to Grá’s spatial design with bespoke speakers made by Mohawk General Store founder Kevin Carney sitting alongside a bespoke DJ booth.
The result is a rustic industrial warehouse aesthetic, with a laid-back inviting atmosphere.
